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With daily headlines focusing on war, terrorism and the abuses
of repressive governments, and religious leaders frequently bemoaning
declining standards of public and private behaviour, it is easy to get
the impression that we are witnessing a moral collapse.

But I think that we have grounds to be optimistic about the future.

Thirty years ago, I wrote a book called The Expanding Circle, in
which I asserted that, historically, the circle of beings to whom we
extend moral consideration has widened, first from the tribe to the
nation, then to the race or ethnic group, then to all human beings, and,
finally, to non-human animals. That, surely, is moral progress.

We might think that evolution leads to the selection of
individuals who think only of their own interests and those of their
kin, because genes for such traits would be more likely to spread. But,
as I argued then, the development of reason could take us in a different
direction.

CAPACITY TO REASON

On the one hand, having a capacity to reason confers an obvious
evolutionary advantage, because it makes it possible to solve problems
and to plan to avoid dangers, thereby increasing the prospects of
survival.

Yet, on the other hand, reason is more than a
neutral problem-solving tool. It is more like an escalator: Once we get
on it, we are liable to be taken to places that we never expected to
reach.

In particular, reason enables us to see that others,
previously outside the bounds of our moral view, are like us in
relevant respects. Excluding them from the sphere of beings to whom we
owe moral consideration can then seem arbitrary, or just plain wrong.

Prof Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University,
draws on recent research in history, psychology, the cognitive science,
economics and sociology to argue that our era is less violent, less
cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence.

The decline in violence holds for families, neighbourhoods, tribes, and states.

In essence, humans living today are less likely to meet a violent
death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others,
than their predecessors in any previous century.

EFFECT OF RISING IQS?

Many people will doubt this claim. Some hold a rosy view of the
simpler, supposedly more placid lives of tribal hunter-gatherers
relative to our own.

But examination of skeletons found at
archaeological sites suggests that as many as 15 per cent of prehistoric
humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. (For
comparison, in the first half of the 20th century, the two world wars
caused a death rate in Europe of not much more than 3 per cent.)

Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as
especially "gentle" - for example, the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of
the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit - turn out to have murder
rates that are, relative to population, comparable to Detroit, which has
one of the highest murder rates in the United States.

In
Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in
some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been had you
lived 500 years ago.

Prof Pinker accepts that reason is an important factor underlying the trends that he describes.

In support of this claim, he refers to the "Flynn Effect" - the
remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that since IQ tests
were first administered, scores have risen considerably.

The average IQ is, by definition, 100. But, to achieve that result, raw
test results have to be standardised. If the average teenager today took
an IQ test in 1910, he or she would score 130, which would be better
than 98 per cent of those taking the test then.

BETTER MORAL COMMITMENTS

It is not easy to attribute this rise to improved education,
because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen the most do
not require a good vocabulary, or even mathematical ability, but instead
assess powers of abstract reasoning.

One theory is that we have gotten better at IQ tests because we live in a more symbol-rich environment.

Mr Flynn himself thinks that the spread of the scientific mode of reasoning has played a role.

Prof Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the
ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our
personal or parochial perspective and frame our ideas in more abstract,
universal terms.

This, in turn, leads to better moral
commitments, including the avoidance of violence. It is just this kind
of reasoning ability that improved during the 20th century.

So there are grounds to believe that our improved reasoning abilities
have enabled us to reduce the influence of those more impulsive elements
of our nature that lead to violence.

Perhaps this
underlies the significant drop in deaths inflicted by war since 1945 - a
decline that has become even steeper over the past 20 years.

If so, there would be no denying that we continue to face grave
problems, including of course the threat of catastrophic climate change.
But there would nonetheless be some reason to hope for moral progress.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University.
His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Expanding
Circle, and The Life You Can Save.